Next-gen Intel Atom chips to feature PowerVR graphics?

Intel’s upcoming Cedar Trail platform may use PowerVR graphics instead of Intel graphics. The folks at VR-Zone got their hands on a leaked slide which shows that the next-generation Intel Atom chips could use PowerVR SGX545 graphics with support for DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.0.

The graphics core could run at clock speeds of 400 MHz or 640 MHz and offer 2D and 3D graphics acceleration with support for MPEG4, VC1, WMV9, and H.264 hardware video acceleration. The graphics core supports HDMI 1.3a and DisplayPort 1.1 output.

PowerVR SGX545 isn’t exactly bleeding edge, but it should provide better graphics performance than the current GMA 500 and GMA 600 graphics used in existing Atom chips.

As we saw the other day, it looks like Cedar Trail chips will be able to support up to 4GB of DDR3 memory. Most Atom chips on the market right now top out at 2GB of RAM.

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If you think this is a good idea, then look into the huge pain-in-the-butt that driver support was, and to some degree still is, with the Poulsbo chipset, which licensed the powervr sgx535 core.

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3rd party driver support is usually iffy and was for the GMA 500 but I think there is a push to fix that short coming now. Especially since these chips have started going into more main stream products. Like the MP (multi-core) variant of the SGX 543 is going into the new PSP2 and has already gone into the iPad2.

The PSP2 will be getting the SGX 543 MP4 (4 cores), which has been compared to PS3 level performance, and the iPad has the SGX 543 MP2 (dual core). Anandtech has already benched the iPad 2 and shown it has 2-5x the performance of the Tegra 2 graphically.

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It’s a pain in the butt if you’re on of those who tried using Linux on them.

For Windows it works just fine and you get hardware accelerated video, something even the GMA 3150 core doesn’t do.

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I think Intel does this so people will stop badmouthing their integrated graphics efforts.

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I guess somebody spotted this and now it’s echoing all over the net today. If you bothered to read the details about Cedar Trail that were announced last week, then you would have noticed that the new GPU parts were obviously related to the GMA 500 lineage. People should proceed cautiously in their comments about this. Yes, Linux-support for the GMA 500 has been a debacle, but it’s been Intel’s fault only to the extent that Intel put itself in the position where it didn’t have enough control over a product to give the support that it pledged. You can pretend like this won’t happen on other platforms, but my understanding is that support for various Windows versions has been tough to come by through some OEMs as well. You need to not think like a child about technology. Software is like laundry: it’s never actually done. Having a driver… Read more »

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